268 JEROME CARDAN 



assumption of the dogmatists, and the eccentricities of 

 the Arabic school gave additional cogency to the cry 

 for more light. The sects which Galen had endeavoured 

 to unite sprang into new activity within a century after 

 his death. The Arabian physicians, acute and curious 

 as they were, had exercised but a very transient influence 

 upon the real progress of the art, the chief cause of 

 their non-success being their adhesion to arbitrary and 

 empirical tradition. At the end of the fifteenth century, 

 Leonicinus, a professor at Ferf ara, recalled the allegiance 

 of his pupils to the authority of Hippocrates by the 

 ability and eloquence of his teaching ; and, by his trans- 

 lation of Galen's works into Latin, he helped still farther 

 to confirm the ascendency of the fathers of Medicine. 

 The Arabians, sprung from the East, the storehouse of 

 drugs and simples, and skilled in Chemistry, were the 

 founders of the Pharmacopoeia, 1 but with this exception 

 they did nothing to advance Medicine beyond the point 

 where the Greeks had left it. The treatises of Haly, 

 Avicenna, and Maimonides were little better than faint 

 transcriptions of the writings of the great forerunners. 

 Their teaching was random and spasmodic, whereas the 

 system of Hippocrates was conceived in the spirit of 

 Greek philosophy, moving on by select experience, 

 always observant and cautious, and ascending by slow 

 and certain steps to the generalities of Theory. Indeed 

 the science of Medicine in the hands of Hippocrates and 

 his school seems, more than any other, to have presented 

 to the world a rudimentary essay, a faint foreshadowing 

 of the great fabric of inductive process, subsequently 

 formulated by the genius of Bacon. At various epochs 



1 The Materia Medica of Mesua, dating from the eleventh century, 

 was used by the London College of Physicians in framing their 

 Pharmacopoeia in 1618. 



